Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said the company “communicated really badly on this (experiment) issue.”

| TNN | Updated: Jul 2, 2014, 04.40PM IST

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said the company “communicated really badly on this (experiment) issue.”

NEW DELHI: As regulators in the UK start looking into the secret psychological experiment that Facebook carried out on users in 2012, the company’s COO Sheryl Sandberg said it was like just any other product testing and it was aimed at improving the quality of service for users.

Sandberg, who is visiting India that is the second biggest market for Facebook with over 100 million users, said the company “communicated really badly on this (experiment) issue.”

“There is a lot to this (user privacy and users data) but to talk about this specific issue, it was a one week study a long time ago and it was like any product… testing different aspects of the product so that we can provide a better newsfeed experience,” said Sandberg.

In 2012, for nearly a week Facebook manipulated the timeline of over 6 lakh users, showing one set of users only positive status updates while showing others only negative status updates. The users who were part of the experiment were not aware that their timelines had been manipulated.

Sandberg’s comments come hours after the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK opened an inquiry into the Facebook experiment, investigating whether the company broke data protection laws applicable in that country.

In response to regulatory questions are around the experiment, Sandberg said, “We work very closely with the regulators all over the world… we are fully in compliance (with regulations). We know this because we have these dialogues and we have felt very confident there.”

Sandberg also assured that Facebook takes the privacy of its users very seriously. “We take privacy very seriously. It is the hallmark of our service, it is the underpinning of our service,” she said.

Earlier, Adam Kramer, A data scientist who led the Facebook team conducting the experiment, said the research was done “because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product”.

“The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service. Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety,” Kramer wrote on his Facebook page.

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